#TwoCentsOnTuesday

It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you’re not willing to put in the work.

It doesn’t matter how hard you work if you’re working on the wrong things.

It doesn’t matter what you work on if you don’t see it through to the end.

As justice gives every man a title to the product of his honest industry, and the fair acquisitions of his ancestors descended to him; so charity gives every man a title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise: and a man can no more justly make use of another’s necessity, to force him to become his vassal, by with-holding that relief, God requires him to afford to the wants of his brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and with a dagger at his throat offer him death or slavery.

As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Error: we can be wrong, or we can know it, but we can’t do both at the same time.

Division breeds discouragement. A farmer, in the grand perspective, is humanity gathering food. But if a farmer can’t see past their plow and cart, and forgets the dignity of their vocation, they become merely a worker in a field. The craftsperson, instead of expressing humanity’s artistry and ingenuity, becomes a slave to a dollar. The pastor or priest, instead of radiating living faith, becomes a relic of dead tradition. The lawyer becomes a law-book; the sailor, a ship-rope; the mechanic, a machine.